I Give You My Silence by Mario Vargas Llosa
Peter Craven
Mario Vargas Llosa was a dazzling writer. Peruvian Nobel Prize winner died last year He not only created masterpieces, but also wrote book after book, displaying an astonishing variety: Speech in the Cathedral, Death in the Andes, Aunt Julia and the Screenwriter. These are all books that show what the novel can do.
He was doubling conversations in different chapters of the same book, twisting and playing narrative games he had learned from Faulkner or Borges. It featured recurring characters and explored every fictional possibility, whether the outcome was entertaining or labyrinthine.
Moreover, Vargas Llosa was a man of the world in every sense. He started life as a left-hander, ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990, and lost (whatever the appeal of his liberal monetarism) to Alberto Fujimori. His uneasy friendship with the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez ended when Vargas Llosa famously punched him in the face.
Vargas Llosa seemed to have no fear of failure: his book on Roger Casement Dream of the CeltsIt definitely doesn’t work. neither did I Hard Times, second to last book.
This latest work of fiction – I give you my silence – The work, published in Spanish in 2023, belongs to the small works of Vargas Llosa. But that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of all kinds of magic. How could it have come from his pen without him?
The central figure, Tono Azpilcueta, is a journalist of sorts who regularly writes about music and, in particular, a Creole guitarist. A wealthy arts patron decides to pay the commentator to write a biography of the elusive guitarist. Although Tono has only seen her perform once, she remains central to his understanding of his own destiny. Tono discovers that his hero almost died as a child and is left adrift in a malevolent place full of rats, flies and mosquitoes. Later, not only does Tono himself nearly die, but he is also plagued by a fear of mice that causes him to claw at himself until he bleeds.
Despite this, Tono writes a biography of the Creole master and argues passionately that only the magic of Creole music could allow Peruvian culture to fulfill its destiny. Her publisher makes the surprising discovery that the biased biography attracts far more readers than you might think. Tono finds himself appointed to the chair of Peruvian studies, where he can answer any objections that might be made to the portrait of the great Creole singer, and he is also invited to Chile, where he becomes a great cultural hero.
But that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of all kinds of magic. How could it have come from his pen without him?
But it is inevitable that the events will be a somewhat cruel reenactment of the Creole guitarist’s vague boast that gives this strange book its title: “I give you my silence.” The musician is a puzzling figure for Tono, who sees him as the key to a locked door. Meanwhile, she is hopelessly in love with a famous singer, who is keen to say that they are just good friends, although she takes him to a psychiatrist when he has one of his mouse attacks.
He is also horrified by the remnants of shamanism in Peru and cannot think of anything more terrifying than touching the person afflicted by the cousin of the deadly rodent guinea pig. There are meditations on the cruelty of bullfighting and the greed of the conquistadors.
In a long and somewhat alienating note, translator Adrian Nathan West discusses a central term in the text. I give you my silence: huachafería. Given its deep thematic centrality to the novel, the word defies translation.
West points out that the term huachafería also appears in a seductive cavalcade in a novel by Vargas Llosa: Bad GirlHe points out that standard dictionaries poorly translate this as “claim”. The translator tells us that Vargas Llosa finished I give you my silence Three years before his death in April 2025, so we should not be too quick to classify it as simply the result of his dementia.
Like Julian Barnes’ Departureit’s a mocking act of farewell. Yes, there are hundreds of minutes of placid music and epigrammatic clarity in a book that is clearly flawed but still shows a master’s touch at every turn.
I give you my silence It burns with the fact that an untouchably great Vargas Llosa is playing with his flocks of mice and his dead friends who once made good jam. He is faced with two deeply contradictory ideas: first, that Spanish, the language of Cervantes, is one of the most spoken languages in the world; and second, despite its vast reach, it can only give it resounding power in a place where the world is a garbage dump and widespread, fearful disease is the only catchphrase.
The effect is slightly disorienting, but still deeply moving in itself – as if the great novelist’s remaining power was simply to tell a story whose vital terms cannot be translated.
Even so, West’s translation remains bleak, majestic, and idiomatically effortless. My only real reservation was that he used “thus” when “thus” would definitely work.
I give you my silence Published by Mario Vargas Llosa with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
